[Sca-cooks] Another question on peas

[wheezul at canby.com]

> A 16th Century person would have referred to pea as pease (the noun is
> singular, plural peasen as derived from OE) the ending -se being dropped
> sometime after 1600.  The word has nothing to do with Pisa, being derived
> from the Greek "pison."  I suspect, but do not know, that Ryff's error
> stems
> from the Latin plural of "pisum," which is "pisa."

That parallel with the plural seems quite logical and the German word for
pea is also in the plural form.  I actually giggled when I read that part
about Pisa as it seemed patently untrue, but something my persona would
say having "read it in a book" or being something my husband told me
"having read it in a book".

I need to correct what I wrote about Alsace being the source of green peas
which will teach me to post too late at night - Ryff says that the rounder
forms are sometimes green, and are called "green peas" in Alsace and not
that they come from Alsace.  This sentence implies to me that they may not
generally have been thought of as green, especially as he describes the
common form as white and certainly not the way I perceive them in a modern
sense.

>> Are there some good basic reference books I should consult about period
>> specific forms of food that have since been highly hybridized?  Grains,
>> especially?> The basics are covered in Davidson"s Oxford Companion to
Food (available
> in
> paperback as the Penguin Companion to Food, IIRC) and The Cambridge World
> History of Food.

Thank you - this sort of general reference work is where I'd like to start
and work outward from there.

  If you seriously get involved in the study, be ready to
> read a lot of scientific papers, herbals, obscure journals, contemporary
> letters and general history.  For grains, legumes and the like, you will
> need to add archeological summaries.  You also need to work with Linnean
> taxonomy (to precisely define what you are talking about) and get a handle
> on pre-Linnean taxonomy.  Sounds daunting, but I find it a lot of fun.
>
> Bear

It does sound like fun to me.  I am sure along the way I will find an area
of fascination that will probably require all of the above.  I look
forward to it!

Thank you again,

Katrine